Civilian leaders need military reading lists
On video games, "Bridge on the River Kwai", and the very reasonable expectations that soldiers and civilians alike ought to have of their elected and appointed leaders
As the United States has continued to professionalize its military leadership, moving far away from the practice of swelling and shrinking that prevailed prior to World War II, one of the laudable practices that has been widely adopted is the publication of professional reading lists. These come from top brass, and they are meant to point lower-level leaders towards ideas that ought to help them contribute more creatively and thoughtfully to the nation’s defense.
■ The Chief of Naval Operations, for instance, recommends books that have obvious military applicability (like “Innovating Victory: Naval Technology in Three Wars”), but he also lists books like Viktor Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning”, an extremely important work by a Holocaust survivor about the very essence of life.
■ Many of the entries in these kinds of reading lists are exactly what one might hope that military leaders are thinking about (Britain’s Chief of the Air Staff recommends “The Taiwan Story: How a Small Island Will Dictate the Global Future”), but the Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force is not alone in recommending much older writers like Audie Murphy and Dwight Eisenhower. Much of what’s worth knowing or considering, at least at the strategic level, has been around for decades and even centuries.
■ Considering the importance of civilian leadership and control of the military, we really ought to expect political leaders to have performed their own due diligence by completing their own reading lists. War isn’t a video game, and anyone who has thoughtfully digested even a single serious war memoir realizes that. Even some movies (like “Dunkirk” or “Bridge on the River Kwai”) belong on such a list because their screenplays force audiences to consider what might go wrong. (Nobody should be allowed anywhere near a chain of command until they’ve watched “Dr. Strangelove”.)
■ A military that continues to develop itself in the direction of better skills, wider knowledge, and stronger ethics deserves civilian control typified by the same.